


Mouthing

by selkieskin



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Asexual Character, Asexual Sherlock, Background Case, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Slice of Life, Vignette, mouthing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 01:42:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7781995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selkieskin/pseuds/selkieskin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock likes to analyse textures and stuff with his lips because they're more sensitive than his fingers. However, he understands the importance of hiding this habit more than most because it isn't strictly necessary, its just easier. He stops bothering to hide it around John. When John finally shows him the bullet-wound, Sherlock wants to investigate it to the best of his abilities. Asexual!Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mouthing

**Author's Note:**

> I found this odd little story I'd written most of years ago and thought I'd finish it.

“Ollie!” the mother hissed, pulling it away from her child's mouth. “Ollie, I told you not to do that! Hands only!”

 

John gave Sherlock a warning look, anticipating an outpouring of sarcasm from his friend. His patience with the ordinary world was even lower than usual at this point in a case, and the poor mother had been through enough already without an irate consulting detective trying to snark at her three-year-old.

 

Of course, Sherlock always reserved the right to totally ignore John whenever he felt like it. He shot the mother a disdainful look, the look that said _you're wasting my time whenever you speak. Do stop it_. The mother froze under his gaze.

 

“What?” she asked. John closed his eyes ready for the fallout.

 

“It's fine.”

 

John's head snapped up. “It's _fine?_ ” Sherlock waved a hand to dismiss his flatmate's surprise, focusing intently on the small rectangular box in the child's hand. It had been found in the victim's pocket but had so far yielded no information. Sherlock was convinced there was more to it.

 

“He's investigating,” Sherlock continued. “It's gone through forensics already. If he could speak properly I'm sure he'd be more help than you're being at this moment.” He got down and took the box, made of an odd rubbery material, away from the child himself. “You looked surprised,” he said to him. “Why?” Then he put the box up to his mouth himself, drawing the soft lips over the surface of it.

 

“What is it?” asked John, registering the look of triumph dawning on his flatmate's face.

 

“Aha!” responded Sherlock, putting his finger where his mouth had been as if to mark a spot and whirling away, only to return a few seconds later with a scalpel.

 

“What?” John demanded.

 

“A seam, John! A seam!” Sherlock was gleefully working the scalpel into the seam in the lid, trying to prise it open. “Oh, Ollie, you have been a great help, though I'm afraid I can't say the same for you, Ms. Parker. You may both go now.”

 

It was, as usual, left to John to calm her down, apologise for him and usher her out.

 

-

 

Sherlock glanced up at John, then back down. He brought the hand up to his mouth, eyes half-closed, drawing his thin, pale lips across it. First the palm, and then the fingers in turn, from the base upwards, each one. Usually, someone doing this to someone else would make them seem like a lover, but Sherlock was instead surrounded by an oddly childlike air as he absorbed himself in the motions.

 

Or, he would have been if the hand hadn't been cold and dead, with the fingertips sliced off as surely as the head, and if this wasn't a crime scene crawling with police officers, all of whom were luckily turned away at that moment in time.

 

“Sherlock!” John exclaimed from the sidelines, shocked. “What the-!”

 

“He was a roof thatcher,” responded Sherlock. “The skin is much thicker and rougher here, between the thumb and forefinger, and between each finger it's the same story, while the pads of the fingers themselves are mostly unaffected until near the ends. He's been doing it recently, too, as this tenderer skin here can testify.”

 

“So, er... what was he doing on a council estate in the middle of London?” asked John. Sherlock brightened considerably.

 

“That, John, is the right question!” He leapt into action.

 

-

 

The next time, John walked in on Sherlock putting what appeared to be severed human fingers up to his mouth, again and again. John stood for a few seconds at the door with the groceries, not quite sure what to make of it.

 

“Erm... why are you-”

 

“Experiment,” Sherlock cut across him, and kept right on doing it.

 

John wasn't quite sure what to do with himself. He half-turned away, and did a double-take. Then he muttered a strict “ _right_ ” to himself and got right on with putting the shopping away. He had been going to heavily hint at Sherlock that he should actually help with the groceries, as he usually did, but this time he was silent. His gaze kept being caught by what Sherlock was doing, wondering whether he should call him out on it.

 

Sherlock looked back at John, puzzled, and then, as it clicked, his expression turned withering.

 

“Oh, for you this might have erotic connotations. I'd just like to assure you that's _not_ why I'm doing this.”

 

Straight to the point, as usual. Well, at least John had established that it really wasn't anything dodgy, as per his role as the conductor of Sherlock's social affairs.

 

“You are... careful, about who you do this in front of, right?” he had to ask. Sherlock gave him a withering look in return.

 

“Naturally, I don't do this in front of people.”

 

“And I'm not people now?”

 

“Don't be so dense, John. You know what I mean.”

 

“Yeah, yeah. I'm not 'people',” he muttered, making his way to the kitchen and hefting the shopping bags up onto the table. “Seeing as I'm no longer a person, can you shift your arse away from your important taste tests for me and help put stuff away?”

 

“Of course I'm not tasting it. This fingers have been exposed to various necrotic poisons, and I am investigating the effect on the skin's pliability.”

 

“Er... right. I didn't actually need to know that.”

 

Sherlock didn't help with the shopping. But John hadn't seriously expected him to anyway.

 

-

 

The next time, John just looked away when Sherlock started his lips roving up some poor dead woman's leg. No, it didn't look right at all, but John knew Sherlock well enough to know it really wasn't the way it would appear to anyone else if they were watching. He just wasn't like that... with anyone, as far as he could tell, let alone dead bodies. They'd been called here because although at first glance it seemed like a pretty straightforward suicide, it had actually turned out that the body was a lot older than it looked, and had been all but enbalmed in an attempt to preserve it by someone. It was pretty simple for Sherlock to deduce that she had been a drug addict, though her flat seemed surprisingly nice considering.

 

He tried to imagine the look on Lestrade's face if he walked in on them at this stage in the investigation.

 

“She shaved, she didn't wax,” Sherlock proclaimed. “This isn't her flat.”

 

John looked around, confused. Yes, the dead woman on the bed matched the pictures all around the room. The make-up matched that on the bedside table. So, what...?

 

“What do you mean 'this isn't her flat?' Why not?”

 

“Did you see any shaving products in this flat? The bins obviously haven't been emptied in a while, and they contained only waxing strips. There are some unused waxing strips in the cupboard. Although there are all the usual things you might find all over this house, she obviously wasn't living here.”

 

“You mean...” Woah, that was creepy. The pictures of her on the walls were of her in the same clothes they had found in the wardrobe, though they had all been recently washed and ironed. On second thought, the contents of the bin had seemed suspiciously clean...

 

“Yes. Although it's been made to look like it, this isn't her flat.”

 

-

 

“Why do you do that with your mouth?” John asked when the case was over, and they'd both collapsed into their respective chairs at 221b.

 

“Hmm?”

 

“Why do you do that... putting your mouth to... things? Even with dead bodies?”

 

Sherlock leaned forward, turning his all-seeing gaze onto John and pressed the tips of his fingers together before his mouth in a thinking pose.

 

“Why do you think I do it?” he challenged.

 

“Well, er...” John thought. “We've already established that you're not doing it in a sexual way, don't worry, though god knows what anyone else might think if they saw you at it. In fact, you know they wouldn't react well, because you don't do it in front of anyone else but me, and you've only started doing it in front of me in the past few months.”

 

“True. Continue.”

 

“I suppose you... it's like an extra sense for you, you like to get close to things to work out what they mean. It's like how toddlers put stuff in their mouths – you just never outgrew it. Of course.”

 

“The lips are much more sensitive than the fingers. In a case sometimes it's vital for me to be able to use my sense of touch to discover certain things – it's a large part of why I do my experiments at home. Pictures can tell you everything you need to know visually but they can never communicate how something feels or smells. I need all of my senses to get as much information as possible, John. Second-hand isn't enough sometimes. You understand that.”

 

“Yeah. Yeah, I... suppose that makes sense.”

 

Sherlock smiled up at him.

 

“I'm glad you agree. Fancy a Chinese?”

 

“Love one,” John confirmed.

 

-

 

“ _Why did you wash the curtains?_ ”

 

Jeanne Blackmount, the wife of the house, had a short list of some very odd behaviours, detailed in an anonymous letter pleading for help regarding the dying man who lived here. One of these behaviours was regularly soaking the curtains in bleach 'to make them clean'. Sherlock obviously saw the curtains as a key piece of evidence, and was as always fierce in his defence of lost evidence. He knew that such things often cost him a solution.

 

He was currently turning his ubiquitous style on the maid. Posh house.

 

“They, they needed washing! After James threw the wine on it – very odd, I don't understand it, something I'd expect Jeanne to do, not him, I've never – I mean, I took them down and put them through the wash, because they're white and it might've stained, miracle it didn't actually, and, and I was meant to keep the house clean, and I thought that, seeing as the lady was away, I-”

 

“Both of you, shut up,” he pre-emptively warned John, before sneering at her: “Oh, go and cry somewhere else!” She quickly obliged, almost in hysterics. Sherlock turned back to the curtains again, face disturbingly normal. He was heedless as usual of the emotional distress he caused witnesses. He knew intellectually – after all, he had John to keep reminding him – but he just couldn't bring himself to care when he was faced with a puzzle to solve. After all, no-one would think there was anything suspicious about Sir Ian Blackmount's health if they hadn't received an anonymous note begging them to look into it. And that was what made this so exciting. So many possibilities!

 

“She knows nothing, as I suspected, but her confession is starting to make James' involvement look much more likely. He wanted her to wash those curtains, but why...”

 

He got onto all fours and started frantically mouthing and stroking the edges of the curtains, searching for any weakness.

 

“And this is why you wanted to make her leave the room? Oh, Sherlock,” John sighed, “there really are nicer ways to do it.”

 

Sherlock looked so comical though, that eventually he couldn't help but let out a snort of laughter.

 

“You look deranged when you do that, you realise. Like some kind of mad spider.” He gave in and outright laughed at the detective. Sherlock grinned and rose to his feet, clutching the curtain.

 

“Never mock my methods, because look!”

 

John looked. He didn't see anything.

 

“The victim was a smoker, as we know, and his wife has only been playing mad to make him die more quickly.”

 

“She's pretending?”

 

“Yes, John, keep up. In fact, his current chronic lung disease can probably be traced back to these curtains being soaked in a mixture of bleach and acid, but only on his side of the table – on hers, she stuck with bleach. The fabric is weak on both sides, but significantly more so on his. This also explains why she always kept her face covered.”

 

“So, it was for his money?”

 

“Obviously. She thought that this way, no-one would figure out what was really going on. Her lover and the victim's brother, James Blackmount, is in on this too. Oh, I've solved it!”

 

-

 

“Yeah, well, because _someone_ didn't want to go to the hospital, I've got to treat my stomach wound all by myself. _You_ can wait until I'm done.”

 

Sherlock sighed, and flopped himself down exasperatedly on the sofa. His arm throbbed, still bleeding slightly, but he wasn't in any danger from it, although it probably needed to be dealt with soon. Who needed a hospital waiting room when you had a doctor already to hand? The facts of the case were still whirling in his mind – they had solved it, but it had been a dangerous one and his brain was still buzzing with adrenaline. He liked that high, so he rode it.

 

He wanted to talk to John about it. Where was he? Still in his room? Sherlock got up and went straight to him.

 

“Are you done yet?” Sherlock let himself in to John's room. Luckily his arm wasn't bleeding as profusely as it was, but he would still need stitches. John's stomach was less serious, but it had still needed cleaning and a few stitches to close it. That smuggling group they had faced today had been far too good with knives.

 

John tensed at the unexpected intrusion into his space, uncomfortably aware that his shirt was off and so his shoulder wound was exposed for all to see. He could see Sherlock looking at it, fascinated. He briefly battled with himself about whether to leave his wound incompletely sorted, but stubbornness took over. His war wound was nothing to be ashamed of, and as for Sherlock, he could bloody well wait his turn.

 

“That's where you were shot.”

 

“Yes.” A curt reply. What more was there to say? An uncharacteristic extended silence settled on them. Sherlock still stared.

 

“What?” John snapped.

 

“May I...” Sherlock responded, evidently before he really thought about it, because he cut himself off.

 

“What?” John asked again, less accusingly, but still annoyed. Sherlock gulped.

 

“May I... see it?”

 

“You can see it from over there.”

 

“No, I mean... see it. Closely.” He almost looked embarrassed, though John was pretty sure he was incapable of that. Unsure, maybe. “I want to investigate it.”

 

“You want to... _oh._ ” The potential implications of that last utterance hit – John knew Sherlock Holmes by now – and John found his head whirring. Could he allow that? Was it too far? “I suppose I... don't mind.” What? Of course he should mind, what was he saying? He hadn't even let any of his girlfriends see it. He didn't know why it felt right that Sherlock was allowed to know things about John that even his girlfriends never knew. In fact, he often counted on the detective to deduce things about him so he didn't have to say them out loud. John always felt thrilled, found it wonderful whenever Sherlock's penetrating, all-consuming concentration was directed on him. It was as if he was fascinating or something. The feeling was addictive. He was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to feel that way for someone he didn't actually fancy, but the rules never seemed to matter around Sherlock Holmes.

 

The rules of social convention certainly didn't. Whoever heard of an adult retaining the mouthing behaviour that most people left behind with nappies?

 

Sherlock drew close, and John went back to his stitching determinedly. Stitching yourself up needed a much steadier hand than stitching up someone else – the angles were less familiar, the view obscured. Besides, it may have been superficial but it was a larger cut than he'd hoped to find, and the sooner he dealt with it the better.

 

That, and it gave him an outlet to not have to deal with the other situation.

 

There was a long time that Sherlock was obviously just looking, watching the wound dimple and smooth as he worked the needle. So John nearly startled when he felt Sherlock's breath against the wound, not realising he'd got that close.

 

“You alright there?” he found himself saying out of surprise.

 

Sherlock didn't answer that question directly.

 

“Could you raise your arm?” he asked instead.

 

“Hang on, hang on, give me a moment,” John replied as if this was absolutely normal. “Just got to finish and tie this off... there.”

 

He gave a sigh of relief at the tricky task of stitching himself up being over. He took a moment to scold himself for being self-conscious about his wound – it was too late now, after all – and raised his arm above his head.

 

John by now was half-expecting the brush of fingertips, but his skin twitched anyway.

 

“Does this hurt, John?” Sherlock asked.

 

“No, not any more,” John confirmed.

 

“Good,” said Sherlock, and he took this as his cue to vigorously prod the wound. John squirmed forward and turned to Sherlock.

 

“Right,” he scolded, “it feels a bit odd, that, so be gentle, alright?”

 

“Turn back around,” Sherlock said instead of addressing that, focus piqued. John rolled his eyes and complied, helped by Sherlock taking hold of his shoulders to forcibly manoeuvre him into place.

 

He felt the fingers go to his wound again, thankfully a little more carefully. He felt them manipulate the skin around the scar tissue, pulling it so this way and that to see how it changed, and then... he felt something softer brush the wound.

 

 _That was his lips, right?_ John thought, and he gave a bit of a huff of consternation, not sure what to do. Sherlock stopped and drew back.

 

“Does this make you uncomfortable?” he asked directly.

 

John processed for a second, and then snorted.

 

“Well, no. It's you, isn't it,” he said, not able to help the note of affection in his voice at the other man's strange ways.

 

“Then raise your arm again.”

 

John obliged and felt that same soft touch on his sensitive wound. The skin twitched.

 

“Aha! I thought so,” Sherlock's voice was alight with excitement, as if he'd just found an interesting twist to a case. “You have some shrapnel still in the wound. Not much, only a fragment or two. Not visible from the surface, only possible to tell when feeling the wound when it is sunken in.”

 

“You're right,” John confirmed, always amazed and slightly pleased. He smiled, involuntarily.

 

“You see, John,” Sherlock continued, “my methods may be unusual, but this is why they work.”

 


End file.
